economics

I’ve been busy doing holiday things and have been blissfully ignorant of the week’s news … until this morning. Going back online is jarring. I just want to go back to making pot roast and prepping vegetables.

The Mnuchins are almost as tacky with their wealth as the Trumps, and that’s quite a feat. The tax bill that Republicans are flogging is the latest attack in the one-sided class war that’s been going on my entire life. It’s long past time for the 99% to start fighting back.

Mayors and governors are debasing themselves and their constituents for the chance to woo Amazon’s second headquarters. Here in Boston, we already did this with GE, a failed Olympic bid, and an indy car race that no one but our Mayor wanted. Thankfully our local sports teams have fully privately funded stadiums, so we didn’t have to endure that nightmare common to other municipalities.

I wrote this way back when Juicero first made the news for being an insanely expensive, DRM’d, yet easily hackable (squeezable) proprietary juice machine.

The stupidity of Silicon Valley economics is an evergreen topic, so I saved this script for when I needed to do something in advance for vacation. Fortunately for me, Juicero’s back in the news and now no one will know I’m phoning it in the week after next.

Last week was supposed to be “Infrastructure Week” for the Trump Administration, but Comey and Jeremy Corbyn made sure no one gave a shit. And that’s just what Mitch McConnell wants, so he can rush through the Senate’s Obamacare repeal while people who have fun during the summer aren’t paying attention.

Privatization and monopolization are both bad and terrible, but that’s a lot of complicated “-zations” to narrow down to a soundbite. Thankfully we have the handy phrase, “Capitalism is bad.” to summarize this sentiment.

Five of the eight largest banks are still too big to fail. Regulators said their plans to wind down weren’t credible and would require bailouts in the event of another collapse. These banks are even bigger than they were in 2008, so the Great Recession Redux will certainly be interesting.